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How to Create a Pinterest Marketing Strategy that works for You

In the last podcast episode, we dove into how to make Pinterest work for your business. If you’re struggling to find your groove while creating your profile, boards, or pins, go back and listen to that episode. That will give you a really good foundation to jump into this week’s episode, where we’ll focus on how to create a Pinterest marketing strategy.

Creating a Pinterest Marketing Strategy That Works For You

Today’s episode is going to be all about creating a Pinterest marketing strategy that works for you. I believe that Pinterest can TOTALLY work for you, as long as you’re implementing the right strategy.

Some of the questions I’ve received over and over in my Facebook group are:

How do I schedule or should I be pinning manually?

Do I repin?

How often should I be pinning?

How do I get my pins seen in the smart feed?

How do I grow my followers?

Let me put your mind at ease. You are not missing anything. I’m not holding back the secrets from you. The key to success is truly all about finding the strategy that uniquely works for you and your business.

How a Pinterest Strategy Can Fit Into Your Business

You want an efficient plan for your business. This ensures that you’re not drowning or exhausted from spending time on an area that isn’t giving you a good return on your investment. As I’ve said (a million times!), Pinterest is a slow burn. It takes time to cultivate sessions and conversions.

If you’re going to invest in Pinterest marketing, I recommend giving yourself six months to a year to evaluate whether it works for your business.

I can 95% guarantee that you’ll start to see movement and growth over time.

How much money can I invest in programs, courses, services, or tools if I don’t have the time to manage my account on my own?

What percentage of traffic do I receive from Pinterest?

Knowing Your Audience and Blocking Out Your Time

If your audience is on Pinterest, it is absolutely worth pursuing it as a marketing strategy. You’re opening up a new door for people to buy your products. If you need help determining if Pinterest is right for you, you can listen to the last podcast episode of 2018.

If you already know your avatar and what they’re searching for on Pinterest, then you need to be spending time on Pinterest. How much time though?

In episode 126, my friend, Ruth Soukup talked about how she was spending 4+ hours a day on Pinterest when she first started using it and she was drowning in it.

I recommend that you spend no more than 5-10 hours per week on Pinterest. Block out specific time for Pinterest! I love using Pinterest and could spend hours just pinning, but for marketing, you don’t want to spend hours and hours working on it.

What to Spend Your Money On

As far as spending money on your Pinterest strategy, I recommend Tailwind for Pinterest scheduling. You can learn all about Tailwind by using our “How to Master Tailwind” guide. I also recommend the first Pinterest course that I ever took, Pinning Perfect.

You can also add Tasty Pins if you have a WordPress site so that the user chooses the correct image to pin on Pinterest. You can use Milo Tree (for $9 a month) to increase followers. Canva is a great program that we use for images.

If you add Tailwind and take the How to Master Tailwind and Pinning Perfect courses, you’ll spend about $450. Even when I was not making much money, I knew that investing in these things would help me to be more efficient with my time and give me the ability to access valuable analytics data.

The Daily Nitty Gritty

I pin a minimum of 5-10 pins per day. Most of those pins are my own content and are being pinned to my own boards, along with a few group boards. How often you pin per day depends on how much content you are creating. There is no magic number. You have to figure out what works for you. It’s not detrimental to pin 10 times one day and 15 the next day.

In the beginning, I was pinning mostly other people’s pins because I was only posting on my site once every quarter. I made sure to pin content that matched what I was writing about and that was not competing with my content.

I wanted to be a resource to my audience and stand behind what I was posting.

Personal Boards vs. Group Boards

You want Pinterest to recognize that you are sharing content about a specific topic to your personal boards. Only join group boards if you know the person, the niche matches yours, there’s a great title to the board, and if it contains content that will benefit your audience.

Remember the user experience and don’t pin the same pins back to back on the same board. New content can take a while to take off on Pinterest. When you create new content, pin it to all relevant boards at least one time per day (use a 24-hour interval between if you’re using Tailwind). Then in a couple of weeks, look in Tailwind and see how the pins performed.

If you have a small seasonal window for your content that does really well, it’s okay to pin it once per day to different boards and then loop back around and pin it again. Just don’t pin it 50 different times to the same board.

Getting Into the Smart Feed

Are you supposed to repin/save from Pinterest or from your website? Your website! Pinterest loves fresh pins, so always, always use your site or Tailwind to pin your content.

Your pin description plays the most crucial role in your pin being noticed by Pinterest. Make sure your description is keyword optimized. This gets you into the search feed.

When pinners save something, it provides a clue to Pinterest on what the person is interested in so that they can build a unique and optimized smart feed for that individual. Also, make sure to create pins with great images to maximize the probability that people will save them. You also want to make sure your descriptions and board names are keyword optimized.

Your audience makes a huge impact on your reach on Pinterest. Whenever possible, encourage your people do the saving for you. Ask your email list to pin a specific pin. Share a pin link on Facebook or Instagram.

Followers and Traffic Don’t Correlate

It’s crucial to understand that Pinterest followers are different than followers on any other platform. People are using Pinterest to curate ideas, not to follow brands. Followers and traffic don’t correlate. You can have 50,000 followers and get the exact same amount of Pinterest-generated traffic as someone with 10,000 followers.

If your content is keyworded and has good engagement, it will bring traffic to your site. It won’t necessarily increase followers. If increasing followers is super important to you, I suggest installing the Milo Tree app, which creates a popup on your site to help grow your followers.

Creating a Pinterest Marketing Strategy for your Own Business

How can you come up with a simple strategy that works for your business? Your Pinterest marketing strategy should look something like this:

I pin ten times per day, 7 of my own pins and 3 of other peoples. I aim to pin my most popular content first, found in my Google or Pinterest analytics. Then I pin seasonal content, and then lastly, my new content. I primarily focus on personal boards instead of group boards and I check my Tailwind stats one time per month to inform me on how it’s working. I check my analytics to see how my pins are performing there as well.

And that’s it! In the seven years that I have been working in Pinterest marketing, I have never found a regimented system to work well.

I don’t use spreadsheets, but we do take notes. We document what we’re seeing and get to know the accounts better. That allows us to create a better strategy for our clients.

Don’t get caught up in the weeds. Just keep looking at what your account is doing.

About Kate Ahl

Kate Ahl is the owner of Simple Pin Media. She helps bloggers and business owners manage their Pinterest page while teaching bloggers and online entrepreneurs how to use Pinterest to market their business. Her philosophy is simple, actionable and uses data based decisions to create the best Pinterest marketing strategy. She runs Simple Pin Media out of a She Shed in her garden, loves good cheese, great friends, and sparkly drinks.

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Hi there

I’m Kate Ahl and I have a passion for helping bloggers/content creators and small business owners grow their business using Pinterest. When I teach Pinterest marketing, I aim for it to be actionable, simple steps that help business owners move forward successfully instead of feeling overwhelmed. You can find out more about me here